Its mandate is to formulate sound economic and fiscal policies, mobilize resources for the implementation of government programmes, disburse public resources as appropriated by Parliament, and account for their use in accordance with national laws and international best practices.

[3] In 1998, the MoF and MPED were merged into the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MoFPED), which the World Bank noted was "critical in establishing fiscal discipline, while building links between policy formulation, planning, and budgeting".

[5] Many of these early reforms had a "cutting-edge dimension"; Uganda was one of the first countries in Africa to adopt a semi-autonomous revenue agency (the Uganda Revenue Authority) as well as introduce medium-term budgeting.

However, local stakeholders, including elected representatives whose mandate it is to monitor service provision, are largely unaware of this information.

In order to solve this issue, MoFPED partnered with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), and Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (ACODE) in 2014 to launch a Budget Transparency Initiative to make department, project-, and location-specific budget information available to politicians, opinion leaders, and the public as well as mobilize them to monitor and provide feedback on the spending and services provided by government institutions.